(Official Washington Examiner editorial, Oct. 5)  By refusing to invoke the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act to suspend the dockworkers’ strike in half the nation’s ports, President Joe Biden terribly abandoned his duty.

Biden got lucky that the union “suspended” the strike Thursday night until January 2025, but by relinquishing the Taft-Hartley leverage, he risked a horrid blow to the nation’s economy while setting a problematic precedent.

[kpolls]

Nearly 50,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association were making outrageously extravagant demands while refusing to work, as their $902,000-per-year, Bentley-driving union president literally threatened to “cripple” the whole economy if the demands weren’t met. Several different analyses say the strike’s overall cost to the economy was shaping up to be $4 billion to $5 billion every single day. The strike, asking for a 77% pay raise that would bring most experienced dock workers well above $200,000 in wages plus overtime, came at all ports along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, even as almost the entire southeast already was suffering from the effects of last week’s Hurricane Helene. And this was all for ports that already, thanks largely to earlier concessions to union power, rank among the very least efficient in the entire world.

The strike’s ill effects would have been manifold and still will be if it resumes in three months. Supply shortages would grow, at first for bananas and other imported foods, but eventually for a cascading list of goods, while prices rise. Exports, too, would be distressed, as almost two-thirds of all U.S. exports go through eastern ports. U.S. manufacturers who export, along with producers of raw materials and foodstuffs for foreign buyers, would suffer. Already, as incoming ships were turned away from ports the dockworkers temporarily closed, the shipping companies were charging innocent importers stateside for the ships’ longer times at sea, even as the importers didn’t actually get possession of the goods the ships were carrying…. [The full column is here.]